Kathleen Sebelius pitches health industry on Obamacare outreach

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has stepped up her pitch to health law stakeholders to chip in on Obamacare outreach and enrollment efforts, administration officials confirmed Friday.

“Part of our mission is to help uninsured Americans take advantage of new, quality, affordable insurance options that are coming thanks to the law,” said HHS spokesman Jason Young. “For the last several months, the secretary has been working with a full range of stakeholders who share in the mission of getting Americans the help they need and deserve. We have always worked with outside groups, and the efforts now ramping up are just one more part of that work.” Congress has repeatedly turned down HHS funding requests for implementation and outreach, meaning the agency has been scrambling for funds.

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The Washington Post, which first reported Sebelius’s more aggressive pitch, suggested federal regulations prohibited the secretary from asking for funds from industry officials in her official capacity, that she could only solicit as a private citizen.
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Young said the Public Health Service Act gives Sebelius the clear authority to “support and encourage others to support, not-for-profits that are working to provide health information or conducting other public health activities.” He said Sebelius was addressing several aspects of outreach, not just the money.

The Post report immediately drew the scrutiny of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). “To solicit funds from health care executives to help pay for the implementation of the president’s $2.6 trillion health spending law is absurd,” Hatch said in a statement. “Moving forward, I will be seeking more information from the administration about these actions to help better understand whether there are conflicts of interest and if it violated federal law.”

And Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said, “The appearance of impropriety is glaring and Congress must investigate and take action to ensure these implied threats do not continue.”

Even a whiff of impropriety would be bad news for Sebelius, who was found last year to have violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits political activity in her official capacity.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel determined in September that Sebelius had offered an “extemporaneous partisan remark” at an event in North Carolina when she spoke in support of President Barack Obama’s reelection and in favor of a Democratic candidate for governor.

At the time, Sebelius said her remarks were off the cuff and that she made a mistake, calling the accusation of a law violation “somewhat unfair.”

Sebelius’s fundraising efforts on behalf of groups supporting the implementation of the health care law follows Congress’s refusals to fund implementation. The federal health care law only included $1 billion to implement the law, much of which has been spent, and the agency has been scrambling.

With the government on the hook to set up exchanges for 34 states that refused to do so themselves — far more than anticipated when the law was drafting — the Obama administration requested about $1 billion last year to implement the law and was refused. It requested another $1.5 billion in the budget this spring, and has not received a penny.

Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a major advocate for the law, has said that the lack of funding poses major problems, especially for the badly needed public outreach campaign beginning this summer to educate the population about Obamacare and help people enroll. “It puts an even greater onus on private sector efforts to reach out to people and educate them,” he said recently. He was not immediately available for comment Friday on Sebelius’s role.

The successor of Obama’s campaign, Organizing for Action, and Enroll America, a diverse collection of the reform law supporters, are planning a major campaign that could pick up the slack.

Some insurers are also beginning to step up and do outreach in advance of enrollment in the exchanges in October. They may not love the law but as one industry analyst said recently, they’re “joined at the hip now."

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 6:38 p.m. on May 10, 2013.